Collage Workshop with Kimmah Dennis

Layered Stories is a 5-day series is designed as independent, drop-in sessions, each offering a complete collage-making experience. Participants can attend one day or all five, exploring different themes, techniques, and approaches to collage without needing prior attendance or experience.

Each date is free and open to the public:

Location: Express Newark, 54 Halsey Street rm 307, The Drawing Room @ Paul Robeson Galleries
Dates: Monday, June 1 – Friday, June 5
Time: 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Level: All experience levels welcome
Materials: Some materials provided; participants are encouraged to bring personal images (including family photos), magazines, fabrics, or found objects.

Focus: Play, spontaneity, and creative instinct

• Welcome + brief intro to collage
• Warm-up: fast cutting and arrangement exercise
• Demo: basic layering and adhesion
• Prompt: create a collage based on intuition (no planning)
• Studio time: complete 1–2 small works
• Group share-out

Focus: Narrative and personal meaning

• Intro + examples of narrative collage
• Prompt: tell a story using images (identity, memory, or place)
• Demo: composition (focal point, sequencing, contrast)
• Studio time: create a story-based collage

Focus: Material exploration

• Demo: combining paper with paint, fabric, and found objects
• Exercise: build texture using layering and surface variation
• Prompt: create a tactile collage emphasizing texture
• Studio time: complete a mixed media piece
• Group reflection

Focus: Personal history and archival materials

• Discussion: using family photos and personal archives in art
• Prompt: create a collage using family photos or personal imagery
• Demo: integrating delicate materials safely
• Studio time: develop a memory-based collage
• Optional writing: short reflection or caption

Focus: Community and collective making

• Intro to collaborative collage practices
• Group prompt: Create a shared collage reflecting the community
• Option: work individually on a larger format piece
• Studio time: build large-scale or collaborative work
• Informal showcase + closing discussion

About Kimmah:

Kimmah Dennis(b. 1996, Yamoussoukro, Côte d'Ivoire) is a Liberian-Ivorian painter exploring displacement, identity, and inherited memory. Through a fusion of materials, methods, and visual languages, she constructs layered narratives that bridge a diasporic past with an expansive present, envisioning future possibilities shaped by resilience and adaptation. Born during the First Liberian Civil War, Dennis draws from the trauma of forced displacement, government instability, and survival. The experience of uprooting at a moment’s notice profoundly informs her artistic approach, leading her to reject the constraints of a single medium. Instead, she embraces painting, collage, and experimental processes to create compositions that reflect the fragmentation and reconstruction of identity. Peeling paint, torn posters, and graffiti serve as a metaphor for impermanence, cultural hybridity, and the fluid nature of memory. Through these layered surfaces, she invites viewers into a dialogue between past and present, permanence and change, and the intersections of local and global narratives. Offering a meditation on belonging and transformation.

Dennis earned a BFA from Rutgers University and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was awarded the prestigious New Artist Society Full Scholarship Merit Award. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including a recent solo exhibition at Temple University Rome Gallery and the Trolley Barn Gallery in Poughkeepsie, NY. She has also shown at the American Academy in Rome, the New York Academy of Art, the John David Mooney Foundation, the University of Chicago, the Color Club in Chicago, Shine Studio, Manufacturers Village, the Paul Robeson Gallery, and the Philly Art Collective. Dennis is the recipient of the 2024-25 Terra Foundation Affiliated Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome and the 2025 Silver Art residence and Visiting Professor at Rutgers University-Newark.

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